According to my dad, this is generally considered the best Audie Murphy biography. It hits a lot of the same pointss as David Smith's The Price of Valor. Hardscrabble childhood in east Texas, Murphy dropping out of school to help care for his siblings after his father vanished and his mother passed away. The war record, the initially reluctant entry into Hollywood after the war. The gambling issues, the skirt-chasing, the untreated PTSD that resulted in nightmares and an occasionally explosive temper.
In many ways, it was interesting to compare and contrast what Graham and Smith focused on. Graham went into more depth about Murphy's life prior to the war, although that might be a result of there being more people still alive in the 1980s to discuss that than in the 2010s. While both authors discuss Murphy's role in the adaptation of The Quiet American, Graham focuses on Murphy's role and acting and how it fits with the changes made to the plot of the book. Smith focused on Murphy taking ill, but also how Murphy, as he did with many things, rapidly lost interest in the project as it progressed.
Graham doesn't ignore that Murphy's war-time experiences, the 2+ years spent knowing he might be killed at any moment, seemed to make him a bit of an adrenaline junkie, always needing something new to stimulate him. But it's more of a constant background radiation, as Graham details the gambling, which only grows worse over time, the buying racehorses, Murphy being made an honorary deputy by more than one law enforcement agency, and even helping the Tuscon police bust drug dealers by wandering the streets at night, looking for people dealing weed or heroin.
Before Shaq or Steven Seagal, there was Audie Murphy, apparently.
Graham actually has several anecdotes about Murphy late in the book that surprised me. Don Siegel considered Murphy for the "Scorpio" role in Dirty Harry. Murphy was in debt from gambling to a guy the FBI were investigating as a big wheel in the Chicago mob. Most bizarrely, Murphy spearheaded an (unsuccessful) effort to get evidence that would convince Nixon to pardon Jimmy Hoffa. While I understood the idea that getting Hoffa out of prison would get Nixon the Teamsters vote, I was less clear what Murphy was expecting to gain. For Tricky Dick or Hoffa to owe him one?
At any rate, Smith didn't include any of those, but since nothing ultimately came of them - just more examples of Audie Murphy not really going anywhere in the last few years of his life - he may have felt they weren't important enough to mention. Smith also made a lot more of Murphy giving away medals, and the psychology behind it, than Graham, who doesn't seem to buy into that idea nearly as much. According to Graham, Audie's family still had plenty of his medals, so he didn't get rid of all of them.
Graham uses a lot of quotes from fan magazines to show either public perception of Murphy, or the type of spin people were putting on his troubled marriage(s). Which was an unexpected approach that acted as a barometer of Murphy's status in Hollywood over the years, and served as a different opening to discuss how things were going for Murphy, or to psychoanalyze him. Either way, this is a much denser book than Smith's, with a lot more details (although it feels like Smith discussed the sometimes dangerous practical jokes and the various romantic liaisons in more detail than Graham.)
'Increasingly Audie had friends in different levels of life and the levels rarely or never came into contact with each other. Audie liked it that way. He could move up or down the scale, in or out of all kinds of groups. He could deal with wranglers and starlets, a filling station owner or a U.S. congressman. He could talk ideas with a doctor of psychology or the metaphysics of betting odds with a bookie. Audie Murphy's America was a place of infinite democratic fluidity where there were no boundaries. Everything was possible if you had the guts and the savvy. Audie thought he had both.'
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